Immigration agency 'laser-focused' on carrying out Trump order

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MERCURY NEWS PHOTO BY MERI SIMON 7/18/2000 Asif Siddique goes through a pile of papers containing his visa and other immigration documents. He has been working in the U.S. on an H-1B visa but his visa expired before he was approved for a green card. He can no longer work in the U. S. but he stays here while he waits hoping to get his green card. Siddique has been in the US since 1987. He went to school at Ohio State University. He is originally from Pakistan.

More H-1B visa applications for workers with advanced degrees from U.S. colleges and universities were selected in the main lottery for the visa this year compared to last year, federal authorities said Tuesday.

The agency, following President Donald Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, tweaked this year’s lottery for 65,000 H-1B visas, saying the change would favor holders of a U.S. master’s degree or higher. An additional 20,000 visas for such applicants are issued under a related process in the lottery, for a total of 85,000 new H-1Bs per year.

Preliminary data show that the share of advanced-degree holder applications selected in the 65,000-visa lottery this year amounted to 63 percent, up from 56 percent last year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Tuesday.

This year’s lottery, which ran at the start of April, drew about 201,000 applications from employers for 85,000 new H-1B visas for fiscal year 2020. Slightly more than half the applications were for candidates with a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. school, Citizenship and Immigration said in a statement.

The agency is “laser-focused” on carrying out Trump’s executive order “to ensure H-1B visas are awarded through a more meritorious selection process,” spokeswoman Jessica Collins said

On top of changing the lottery, the Trump Administration has taken a number of steps as it seeks to fulfill a promise to reform the H-1B. The administration has dramatically increased numbers of H-1B denials and requests for more evidence that a candidate and job qualify for the visa. It has also pledged to remove work authorization from an estimated 90,000 spouses of H-1B workers on track for green cards, but has several times delayed that plan.

The visa is heavily relied upon by major Silicon Valley technology firms who argue for increased H-1B visas they say they need to secure the world’s top talent. Critics point to reported abuses by outsourcing companies, and argue that those firms and their clients — including major tech companies — use the visa to obtain cheaper foreign labor.

But while bearers of a U.S. master’s degree or higher now have a better shot at being selected in the H-1B lottery, there’s no guarantee they’ll get a visa, and federal authorities have narrowed their interpretation of which degree types qualify a visa candidate for particular jobs, said Fremont immigration lawyer Barbara Wong. In the past, for example, electrical engineering, math and physics degrees were deemed suitable for software-engineering jobs, but that’s no longer the case, Wong said.

“The government’s becoming much more restrictive without actually passing any laws in Congress,” Wong said. “I’ve had a lot of people ask if they can go to Canada.

John Miano, a lawyer at the Center for Immigration Studies, which pushes for reduced immigration, called the lottery’s increased share of advanced-degree holders “really not all that significant.”

“From the perspective of American workers, this change means absolutely nothing,” Miano said. “They still can be replaced by foreign workers who can legally be paid at the bottom one-sixth of U.S. wages.”